Like many people, I own a Swiss Army knife made by Victorinox. (actually I own more than one). One of them is a Victorinox USB2 with 1GB memory stick.

I recently lost mine, and was quite upset. Eventually the pen-knife turned up in the laundry, after passing through the washing machine in a 40 degree wash.

I tested it straight away. All the blades were fine, as was the LED torch, the pen and amazingly the memory stick itself. I was seriously impressed, and must award particular credit to Swissbit, who manufacture the USB memory stick on the knife.

Onetel, which is now owned by Carphone Warehouse’s Talk Talk seems to have been having technical problems with their web site. Specifically, the secure log-in for customers.

Onetel spent a lot of time and energy persuading customers to use their online services, instead of paper based systems. At present, log-in is either very slow, or generates a fault page.

If a user successfully logs-in then secure responses are very very slow. Moreover, attempts to view bills online generates an http error 500 - indicating an internal server error.

To add to the exasperation for Onetel customers wishing to complain about the inability to log in, are directed to “log in and use [their] account” to send the complaint.

Even if you do manage to log on, the cripplingly slow responses take several minutes to get through all the pages that are needed before getting to their contact page (which incidentally doesn’t contain a specific option for complaining about inability access user account). Unfortunately even an attempt to use the email contact option from within “My account” has failed, presumably because the pages time out.

If companies like Onetel / TalkTalk want their users to use online services in preference to paper based ones, then they need to look at the quality and reliability of these online services.

whilst cleaning up my hard drive, I found one reason that the Sony Ericsson PC Suite may have had for failing to install and to run slowly.

It created a 1.5 GB plain text log file in the temp directory. That volume of data must have taken a lot of resources by itself. It’s not surprising that the poorly built software could not install.